Stepfather Factory

Here's a video I've always loved. It's actually about the rapper's own experience with an abusive stepfather but also comments on consumerism and on a surface level brings up questions about ethics in building technology. How well will they be made? Who will be able to make them? How safe will they be? How can we control all of this?

Ghost In The Shell: a gaze into the future

Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex is an anime series based on a manga written by Masamune Shirow. The anime is set in Japan in the near future, the year 2030, and deals with issues of cyber-terrorism and the future of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Technology. The series deals with philosophical issues both about the nature of AI and timeless problems such as that of existence and as such may require multiple watches to really appreciate.

The main storyline involves investigation into a case of corporate terrorism perpetrated by a genius hacker which leads down a path uncovering wide-scale corruption in the government and technology companies. There are many individual episodes as well which stand alone and can be watched separately.

There are many themes such as cyborgs, technological enhancements of the human body and whether robots can really gain artificial intelligence that I will talk about in later blog postings. The name of the anime comes from the concept of been able to lift someone's spirit (ghost) from their body (shell) and place it in a full cyborg body (another (robotic) shell) of which the main character (the Major) is an example of. This is a really interesting concept and I wonder if it or something like it may become reality one day. I'll leave this for another post.

You should check it out for yourself though. It really is an interesting program and provokes a lot of thought.

Programmable Matter

The future is going to be great. We'll have many things we can't even dream of but there are many things we can. One of those is programmable matter and one place they are researching this is at Carnegie Mellon University in America. Programmable matter will be an object that can change its form into anything it chooses by rearranging its constituent components (very simple small robots). They call it Claytronics. For now the problem is still in its early stages and researchers are still dealing with how to reconfigure modules of a robot on a larger scale. The aim however is to scale it down to the nano-scale where each robot is nearly as small as an atom. The robots then work together to replicate an object and can turn into whatever you choose. Maybe you don't like how your table looks today, well then just redesign it on the fly.

The idea can be extended passed just solid objects, it could extend to working devices too. An interesting device to have in the future would be a do-all gadget, a gadget that can turn into anything – this may be harder to achieve and need advancement in other sciences but I think it's attainable. Think of the iPhone 56 – one minute you are using it to make a phone call, the next shooting away, pumping lead into a T-1000. Well maybe not, Apple probably won't let that app through the appstore.

Here's a cheesy concept video that was made to portray what the future may be like with Claytronics. However, I'm sure your imagination can envision it much better.